Thoughts on getting customers to accept real-time pricing and utility control

In my previous post, I mentioned a AMI-HAN Bill of Rights. The purpose for the Bill of Rights was to allow the consumer to exert some control over his/her destiny while the power company changes the consumer's world.

This begs the question - Why would a consumer want to have real-time pricing, or buy a home area network, or respond to grid signals?

All the consumer wants to do is to keep plugging in electronic devices and expect them to just work. Oh, and not have his/her electricity rates go up.

Ah, but that's the point, the cost to utilities to produce power is going up - by a lot - due to the increased environmental regulations and restrictions. So, to help the consumer cope or 'manage' his/her increased costs (and reduce the utilities costs) he/she gets smart meters, home area networks, real-time pricing signals, etc. Ok, its more somewhat more involved than that, but that is how the consumer likely will perceive it.

The net result is that the consumer can likely continue to operate as before, but at a substantially higher cost or use the new technology to control his/her power usage according to real-time power price changes.

How?

In Home Displays (IHDs) such as Tendril's Insight or Control4's EC-100 controller provide the basis of a simple home area network (HAN) that talks to a smart meter and provides feedback to the consumer on the IHD of power usage, real-time pricing signals (what my current kWhr price is), power usage rules, and control of appliances.

The idea is that you, the consumer, will buy into this new model because you now get to know how much power you are using right now, what it is costing you today and you can set rules to automatically turn things off and change the thermostat to reduce power usage for periods of time when power is more expensive throughout the day.

Is that really enough of an incentive?

For some it will be. For others it will take more and there will always be some that it will cause information overload.

My guess is that you will see products that add unrelated services to the IHD such as traffic, weather and news to endear you to the IHD so that you will use it more often.

Utilities might add pre-paid power or power budgets (don't exceed $X) to simplify the whole process and to help customers to think in terms that they are used to with their own personal finances.

Whatever products and services are provided, however, it will require a level of promotion, training and communications from the utilities to its customers to which neither have been accustomed.